Friday, October 5, 2012

Is This Just Another Anti-Apple Blog Post?

No...well, yes... but, no, not really. Really.

Over the years, I've used (and owned) a wide variety of gadgetry from laptops to phone to tablets to over-the-top connected TV boxes... and, with the exception of my laptop, I've consistently steered away from Apple products as personal go-to devices. Unfortunately, with the Apple community this behavior on my part is always labeled as some weird form of wrong-thinking Apple hatred...

...now, to be fair, my personal opinion of Apple The Company has taken a strong turn towards the cellar in recent years, but my opinion of the products has pretty much remained the same. With the recent release of the iPhone 5, I figured that this would be an excellent time to state, for the record, what I think about Apple the company vs. Apple the product line, and why - unless something radically changes over the course of the next few years - I will be unlikely to be swayed by an Apple product offering that isn't a laptop.

Full Disclosure: "What's in my Bag" Right Now

In the spirit of openness for framing a dialog like this, it probably makes sense to explain what tech I use in my daily life. Currently, I own several Apple devices, since my position as CTO for the past several companies has always included making sure that my engineering teams properly support their products. To that end, I personally own an iPhone 4S, an iPod touch, a second gen iPad, an Apple TV, and a Macbook Air. With the exception of the Air, which is really a great device that I use 10 hours a day, these devices only come out of my bag for testing my engineering team's product lines, or for studying the iPhone workflow for designing a new application.

In my day-to-day personal world, my phone of choice is a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, my tablet is a Asus Nexus 7 (or an Asus Transformer Prime if I need a 10"), and my "other" laptop is an Asus Zenbook UX21. Attached to my television is a Windows Media Center computer, an XBox, a PS3 and a Roku - all of which get used with relatively the same frequency.

My Life With Apple

As I've stated frequently, I'm 900 years old. There's a certain perspective of history one gets from that height, which comforts me in an otherwise sea of strange aches and pains in my body that weren't there a few years ago. One of those perspectives comes from watching the birth of personal computers, and the companies that formed around them.

In the 1970's, I had my first regular, professional computer-job-related paycheck - it came from MECC, the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium. MECC was a state-sponsored organization with the goal of putting computer facilities within reach of every K-12 student in the Minnesota state educational system. This was done through a variety of means (including teletypes and CRT terminals connected to a central mainframe in Minneapolis), as well as the new kid on the block: the fledgling personal computer.

I was the youngster (in a very literal sense) on an Request For Proposal committee to evaluate potential purchases of some of these new personal computers (called microcomputers back in the day, you young whipper snapper!), the winner of which was the venerable Apple ][, beating out Atari, Commodore and Radio Shack. Being awarded this state contract was a seminal moment in the history of the young company, as MECC placed a large order for the machines.

Throughout the next 3 decades, I've had various flavors of Apple products in my homes, along side equivalent DOS (and, later, Windows) PCs. My interest in the Apple product line was fairly strong, but I never saw them as anything other than another tool for my research or work.

Few outside of Palo Alto had seen anything like it, with it's desktop analog and "intuitive" operating system - and, at $10K a pop, few would. However, from that device, the Macintosh arose, and we can all trace our own personal Apple stories from there.

While entertained and impressed by the little all-in-one Macintosh, I was more interested in other machines of that era, such as the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga, due to their color graphics capabilities. If I think back, for right or wrong, this was the moment I lost interest in Apple as a primary machine in my life.

However, what I did see from the sidelines was a growing marketing presence from Apple, that I would later learn was driven almost entirely by Steve Jobs. Steve came and went and then came again, and drove Apple to become a genius center for product driven marketing, industrial and graphic design. When Apple got into the consumer electronics business with the first iPod, I was right there with it. I loved the device, but hated iTunes. (I had hoped iTunes would change over time, but, sadly, it never did. The iTunes of 2012 is basically the iTunes of 2001.) Until 2 years ago, I have had some form of an iPod as my primary music player.

In 2007, I co-founded a company to support video advertising on cell phones. 2007, it turns out, was also the year of the first iPhone. While the iPhone was raised up as a harbinger of things to come, at the time the industry viewed it as more of a "neat trick." Our company supported it, of course, and kept an eye on it - but most of our clients were more interested in support for RIM devices, Microsoft Phones, Nokia and other devices - this would change, of course, but it took time. iPhones have been a staple in my bag ever since that era - but even though I gave them a shot, I do not use them as my primary device.

My Inability to Separate the Device from the Company

There is a valid argument that goes something like "I can separate the artist from the art." I may not like a particular actor's personal view of the world outside of his movies, but I definitely love his filmography. (Yeah, I'm looking at YOU, Tom Cruise.)

In the case of media consumption devices created by companies that control the media pipeline itself, it's much harder to apply the "separate the artist from the art" philosophy. Business decisions created by the executive team at a company necessarily dictate specifics about a device such as the user experience, media aggregation and distribution, etc. Amazon became one such company when they created the Kindle, as did Google and Apple when they created their phone OSes.

Apple in particular has set about a course of common events and business models within the company that dictate a closed ecosystem ("walled garden") which each user tacitly agrees to join when he or she purchases an Apple product. This is nothing new, the principle of a closed ecosystem has always been present with Apple products from nearly the beginning of the company: Apple computers, for instance, originally would only work with Apple graphic cards, printers, etc. In the hardware arena, this sort of closed environment nearly strangled Apple from within, since it dictates that one company needed to produce every hardware component for their product line, rather than having a published set of standards that other OEMs could use to produce compatible products.

In the world of the consumer electronics however, that same philosophy worked towards Apple's advantage. By taking baby steps towards a closed ecosystem, Apple eventually walled off it's music service to apply to just Apple products, and carried that philosophy forward into the worlds of the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Apple devices were designed to take advantage of this philosophy, and the lure of the shiny "it just works" devices was too strong for the masses.

Less of a Liberal Arts and Technology Intersection and More of a GroupThink Cul de Sac

Apple became the successful powerhouse that Jobs always dreamed it would become. It also created a successful mythos in the process: "Apple creates beautiful technology," the conversation begins, "and therefore attracts those that appreciate it." People wanted into the Apple club, so they bought into the shiny, and became part of the artificial ecosystem.

The results were brilliant, as far as the Apple shareholders were concerned: People showed up to the party and they never left. To be fair, there was a point in time when they could not leave: iTunes purchases, for instance, were protected by DRM that kept people from moving their investment in music from an iPod/iTunes combination to, well, anywhere else. Eventually, that closed door was blown open as iTunes removed most of its DRM restrictions (for a fee, of course) from its music selection, but apparently there are still enough remnants of it that it pisses off Bruce Willis. (iTunes does still DRM protect it's video content.)

So, what's left to keep people in the ecosystem? Two things combine to keep people in the gate: The Shiny plus the "Members Only" effect.

Apple products are pretty, there's no doubt about it. There is a status symbol quality to Apple products - you pay a premium for it, but (and this is the brilliant part) it's not that much of a premium....even minimum wage workers can afford it if they squirrel away their rent money. What this does, of course, is create an insular environment comprised of members of a community who "get it" and who have paid the entrance fee. In a way, it's structured very much like a closed residential community: there's no reason to stray outside of that community, so there's no information coming from outside the community. Without any information flowing in, the members of the community feel that they are a representative sample of people outside the community. (It was amusing to see my niece's face when I showed her that neither iPhones nor Apple laptops dominated their respective marketplaces.)

This effect is called GroupThink, and it's been the rationale attributed to everything from the handling of the Bay of Pigs to Watergate. William H. Whyte, Jr coined the term in Fortune magazine in 1952, and he describes it the main principle of GroupThink with this quote:

The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups.

In other words, Apple keeps its user base together by making them feel like they are members of an elite club. Positive re-enforcement for decisions made by any community member from the rest of the community allow the members to feel like every choice they make is rational, that they have all the available information to make a rational decision, and therefore puts them at a higher plane of reasoning from anyone not privy to exclusive information obtained within the group. Any contradictory decisions or thought processes would be ridiculed as silly or ill-informed, and so member thoughts return inward towards the community. The effect is only broken when a paradoxical evidence for discord is developed within the group itself - discord that cannot be explained away without external, or outgroup, reasoning.

It is important at this point to emphasize that I do not for a moment think that everyone that owns an iPhone is a victim of GroupThink - but when I see brand loyalty trumping logic in otherwise logical people, I do have to raise an eyebrow. An good example that illustrates the effects of groupthink applied to Apple owners relates to the release of the iPhone4. This example works on a couple of levels:

Internal to Apple.The engineers at Apple are very smart people. I know many of them, and I respect those people and their judgement. However, something very serious happened internally at Apple to result in the production and subsequent release of the iPhone4. A number of very very smart people, including hardware engineers steeped in knowledge of radio technology and electromagnetics, got together and as a group came to the conclusion that, for the sake of design esthetics, it would be a good idea to take a radio antenna and place it outside the phone in a spot where it can be in constant contact with human flesh and, in essence, be grounded out.

There's a great paper on antenna mechanics (written by ATT, Apple's carrier partner for the iPhone at that time) which touches on the results of placing an antenna in an area where it is in contact with human hands...

If the product is to be hand-held or otherwise in contact with the human body, remember that interaction with the human body will introduce power loss external to the product in both receive and transmit operation. As a separate issue, interaction with the human body will also cause de-tuning of the antenna. Both of these effects seriously degrade performance. Testing should be performed to properly quantify the effects of the human body.

The GroupThink internal to Apple was so strong, that the fundamental laws of physics were completely disregarded.

External to Apple.The iPhone4 was released with an external antenna cleverly wrapped around the body of the phone as a design element, resulting in a degradation of connectivity with the cell phone towers when in contact with human skin. This is not a software problem, or anything that could be fixed with product recall-style solution. The iPhone4 was a designed with a defect built-in to the phone.

Lest you, dear reader, think this is an isolated event in the world of the iPhone, it just happened again...

The iPhone5 was shipped sans Google Maps, and in its place is Apple's mapping application - which is now the brunt of many a joke and even an unheard of apology from Apple itself... in addition, the new operating system, iOS 6, is showing issues with WiFi connectivity. (At the time of the editing of this writing, Apple just admitted a third fault with the phone concerning the phone's camera.) Once again, smart engineers at Apple released a mapping product that not only couldn't compete with the existing Google Maps application, but didn't actually work. Once again, consumers lined up to buy 5M iPhone5's on opening weekend.

It is difficult to have an objective conversation about products that are protected by the mindset of GroupThink, because it's difficult to convince the members of the group that you are actually trying to have an objective conversation. Any objective view that runs counter the group's faith in the product or service, is met with disinterest (at best), or name calling (at worst). Any conversation that begins with "I purchased product X over product Y," can label one a proponent for "the other side."

Nonetheless, here I go....

My Issues with Apple Products

I make the distinction between the Apple's CE products (iPhone, iPad, etc) and Apple's Computer products (Macbook, Macbook Air, etc) because the two currently have very separate usage philosophies. Apple's computer products are well made devices, with a rich, robust operating system build around a standard UNIX operating system original developed for Steve Job's other computer company, NeXT. There are signs in the recent releases of OS X that imply that many of my issues with iOS that I list below are in the process of bubbling over into OS X, but we probably have a few more years before that happens completely.

So, ok...I'm talking about iOS devices specifically. Allow me to outline five points about these devices that will more than likely keep me from ever desiring one beyond what is required for my work.

They just aren't that interesting.

Let's admit it: iPhones and iPads are the same basic devices they've been since 2007. They have the same cell top, they have the same single-button, they are just - as their patent case with Samsung recently pointed out - slabs of glass with rounded corners.

The iOS user experience, which was inspiring in 2007, is uninspiring in 2012. It's the same that it's always been, really. There's a notification bar now, sure, but even that feels like an afterthought thrown in to play catch-up.

Aesthetically, it just...kinda...lies there.

What happened to the "Think Different?"

Every iPhone is the same as every other iPhone - similarly for an iPad. A user can change the background image, create some folders on the cell top, specialize their ringtone, and slap a "Hello Kitty" case on it... but, it's the same system setup as your buddy next to you. For the most personal device in the world, it's really not very personal.

The devices claim to be something that they are not.

The iOS operating system has been multitasking since iOS4, but it's a limited form called "pre-emptive multitasking." With the exception of certain system privileged applications, iOS devices stop processes and cache them out to disk when a new task is called to the foreground. The original task is resumed from where it left off when you recall it.

There are good reasons for this - a single task running is faster, and avoids errant behavior over the rest of the system. The device's usefulness, however, suffers. iOS devices are only as interesting as the applications that run on them, but the device itself is a neutered version of what it could actually be.

iOS devices feel constraining.

Every time I pick up an iOS device, I feel like I was tossed into a cramped box. I have to go through the same two-step to move from one application to another. Running multiple apps doesn't feel slick or smooth, it just feels pre-emptive, which is, of course, my complaint from above.

iOS doesn't allow me to easily switch default browsers, but that doesn't really matter since other browsers are famously hampered by being restricted from using iOS's Nitro technology, a form of just-in-time compilation. Nitro makes Mobile Safari speedy, but no one else has access to it...which smacks of something that the antitrust people may want to look into.

The cell top is a rigid grid of squares, which is appropriate considering how it feels to use one.

These Things Are Fragile

Seriously fragile. The iPhone and iPad product like place esthetics and supply lines above practicality of owning a portable computer and communication devices. The things get wet, they get dropped, they get placed in a back pocket and get sat on. That's just the way it is... so, why not plan for it?

My Issues with Apple, Inc.

Again, being 900 years old, I've seen IBM come and go, and Microsoft come and (nearly) go. In either case, there were complaints with these companies: too big, too bureaucratic, too out-of-touch with consumers, too monopolistic. All of these complaints were (and are) true - but Apple is in a different league all together.

The Reality Distortion Field

It's a cute name, but I have a more accurate one: the P.T. Barnum Effect.

Steve Jobs was a master showman - there really hasn't been anything like him before in the tech industry - but the willful disregard of reality (the iPhone 4 antenna issue is a great example), the flowery language to describe industry standard features and applications as though they were just invented (Facetime? Seriously?), and misquoting people and figures on stage without anyone fact checking (the first public volley in the Samsung/Apple feud was probably fired by Jobs when he misquoted one of their VPs) have all taken their toll on Apple's credibility.

I had a Mother, thank you.

Look, I get it - Apple wants to vet every application submitted to the app store to prevent malicious hackers from ruining your life. It also has another - probably intentional - side-effect: Apple has control over what you are allowed to see and use, and what you aren't allowed to see and use. I've had applications rejected for being "too much like" existing Apple applications, which sounds a little anti-competitive. Other apps are rejected for content - including Ulysses - which smacks a little like nanny-ism (at best) or censorship (at worst).

Additionally, there's some evidence that Apple tries hard to keep applications out that it deems are too similar to their own product offerings (keeping Google Voice out in 2010, for example, required that the FCC get involved). Other applications, like browsers competitive to Mobile Safari, are denied access to technology that allows the browser the speed advantage that Safari enjoys. These are the sort of tactics that forced the government to step in when Microsoft tried mating Internet Explorer too tightly to the Windows operating system.

If you want to "protect the children" or "protect my phone," fine...but put that control in my hands through ratings systems or "untested" categories, but don't make my decisions for me.

The Birth of a Litigious Culture

This is probably the biggest issue I have with the current incantation of Apple. It has taken a stance that draws on lawyers to protect what it declares as it's IP, rather than designers and engineers to invent legitimate IP.

There's not a lot I can add to the public discourse on Apple vs. Samsung that hasn't been written before. However, I will use this platform to harp on two things:

a) There is a difference between copywrite infringement and patent infringement. Should Apple go after a competitor for copying their icons, user interface design, etc? Absolutely. Should Apple go after a competitor for prior art (in the technology sense of the word "art") that they have both drawn on? No, of course not.

There is not a single UIX feature in modern smartphones (be they iOS, Android or Windows Phone) that does not have prior art. Take, for example, two-fingered multi-touch interfaces: a 10 second wikipedia search shows what I remember from SIGGRAPH papers back in the day: multitouch technology began at the University of Toronto in 1982. Yup, it's 30 years old. Just because you add "on a phone," to the end of a sentence, doesn't make it unique.

b) There's also a concept called "obvious art." Saying a phone is unique (or somehow infringes on a patent) because it is a certain shape or size falls into this category, especially since the iPhone was not the first cell phone to be a rectangular slab with rounded corners, just one of several. (LG/Prada and Sony all produced similar phones in the same time frame as Apple.)

The Proprietary Connector

OK, I know this sounds like it should be in the "consumer devices" column rather than in the company column, but it really does belong here.

Apple has a proprietary dock connector on all of its products. Apple isn't doing this for efficiency, or throughput of the connector itself (the "lightning" connector is essentially USB2 with a different wiring pattern), so why are they doing it? What is the point of making devices with proprietary connectors which forces users to pack one more adaptor into a bag?

In a stalled economy, having $117B in appreciable assets is an amazing feat, but it's not clear to me what they are doing with it. They are not re-investing it in M&A activity, they are not returning it to shareholders, and while they have an active R&D department, it's R&D geared towards making better mousetrap versions of Apple products.

At this stage of the game, IBM created a venture capital arm and re-invested half it's holdings in an active R&D department (IBM Research). IBM Research group was responsible for unleashing on the world: Fast Fourier Transforms (which allowed everything from voice recognition to Pandora to exist), magnetic disk storage, dynamic random access memory, RISC architecture computers, relational databases, and...of course, Deep Blue, the grandmaster chess computer. All of these creations, and too many more to mention, were released to the world with licensing fees rather than aggressive patent protection litigation. The money spent on IBM's R&D not only fed back into IBM in the form of new product lines and licensing fees, but enriched the world.

Similarly, at this stage of the game, Microsoft was heavily involved in the R&D through the Microsoft Research project which has been involved in everything from data visualization to machine learning to computer vision projects. (Thank Microsoft Research for your Kinect.) In addition, since 2004, MS has been giving out healthy dividends to it's shareholders.

...and don't even get me started on Hewlett-Packard and Google.

So again, I ask, what exactly is Apple doing sitting on $117B of cash?

So...

..yeah. That's pretty much the story. With all of the choices out there for cell phones, tablets, convertible laptops...locking myself to a vendor who's business model includes ignoring standards, litigating to the top, makes unexciting products, and locking you into their ecosystem makes little sense in my life.

If you are an Apple user and you get legitimate use and joy out their products, more power to you. Really, I mean that with no factiousness at all. Enjoy it. Really.

In my opinion Apple is to overclassed and to overpaid. Additionally, the iPhone 5 has a wide range of problems, including poor battery life, easy scratching, glitchy iOS 6 performance, and a lackluster Apple Maps, has led Apple CEO Tim Cook to formally apologize to Apple customers for the early issues with their new products.

I used to be an apple fan, long before it came back from near death, and having moved away from it I often hear the question: what happened? I usually describe the feeling of unease I get about apple products simplistically: "I don't like the world domination approach".You just gave depth to this unrefined thought. Thanks

Rocket Pilot

Fortunate enough to have been the CTO/SVP at a number of successful ventures, including Revision3, Transpera, Third Screen Media, m-Qube, MediaRush and ATG. Entrepreneur (now), scientist (then). As proof of both, I perform feats of science for beer. about.me/robdemillo

June 29, 2007. iPhone released. Do I think this will outsell other phones? No. Was it a good idea to sell it locked at a premium? No. Is the fanboy base more annoying than Paris Hilton? Yes. Will it change the way the cell industry treats its users? Absolutely.

Oct 22, 2008. First Android phone release as the T-Mobile G1. Is this specific phone an iPhone killer? No. Is the fact that 30 more Android phones are on their way?

Q4 2008. The world economy collapses due to home financing fiasco. The tech sector begins to feel it - when the dust clears, only the long lasting tech plays will survive.